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| Aqueduct's editors and business manager |
So Aqueduct went to WisCon again
this year. Kath drove one car loaded with books, Tom and I another, and Arrate
flew in, across the Atlantic, and we re-uned joyfully in Madison. Kath and
Arrate arrived in time for the reception and reading at
Room of One’s Own on
Thursday evening, but Tom and I, having caught a few bad breaks, arrived later
than planned, making it to Room only as things were winding down.
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| Aqueduct in the Dealers Room |
I spent the con as I usually
do—talking with friends and acquaintances, attending panels and readings,
making periodic appearances at Aqueduct’s table. I also participated in a panel
and gave a reading. But one of the first things I did after the Dealers Room
officially opened was to make a beeline for Dreamhaven’s table, where I hoped
to find the first volume of Samuel R Delany’s journals, recently released in a
handsome hard-bound edition by Wesleyan University Press. And yes, they had it!
It’s a book of considerable heft, which is both good and bad. Good for obvious
reasons, bad because it means I can’t read it in the bathtub. (Of course, if I
had a tray to span the width of the tub, as I once did, and a book holder to go
with it…)
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| Mary Anne Mohanraj, reading |
On Friday afternoon I attended two
panels. The first, Embracing Socialism, was offered by Mary Anne Mohanraj, Ian
K. Hagemann, and Julia Schroeder (M). Julia said she only started thinking of
herself as socialist during the 2008 election when Obama was frequently labeled
a socialist by the right. (Which raises an interesting point about the work
labels can sometimes do, don’t you think?) Ian identified himself as a longtime
activist. His “socialism,” he said, was a result of years of watching Star
Trek. Mary Anne noted that though she’d been an activist for years, she had not
considered herself a socialist. But when she ran for the library board (which
she did in the wake the 2016 general election), she was required to define her
position on a range of issues, and soon she realized that economic issues are
central to public library policies and politics.
Ian said that when talking
about socialism, we need to remember what socialism actually is. Highways are
socialized. (If they weren’t, everyone using them would constantly be having to
paying tolls.) Parks are socialized. (Which made me think of how scarce public
parks were when I lived in New Orleans, compared with the life-enhancing
abundance of them in Seattle.) Police are socialized—“though badly.” (Which
made me think of the constant scandal that is the Chicago Police Department—and
then of how the notion that the police are there to “protect and serve” entire
communities was new to me when I first encountered it in my high school civics
class, since no one in my family ever called on the police for help because in
their view, the only actually helpful things police ever did was to direct
traffic during power outages and civil emergencies, or after a heavily attended
event let out.) But we don’t have socialized health and human services (which
is why most people living in the US are one serious illness away from
bankruptcy). The Public school system is socialized—the “reason,” perhaps, that
current Secretary of Education appears to be doing her utmost to destroy it. We
need, Ian said, to articulate what is good about the socialized services we do
have and then see where the argument breaks down for socialized health and
social services.
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| An Aqueduct reading |
Mary Anne noted that some cities
have lovely libraries while others do not. Implementation of public library
services is extremely variable—as with public schools and state colleges. She
cited Roland Barthes on why the right is so much better at attractively
mis-naming policies etc than is the left. And then she said “I think we have to
talk about Bernie Sanders. He moved the Overton Window. (And Occupy Wall Street
prepared us for Sanders, paving the way for ‘changing the conversation.’)” She
suggested that this was the most valuable aspect of Sanders’ campaign. Ian then
observed that the in the US the 1950s were “a cauldron for social and political
change” because of the high income and capital gains taxes then in effect. People
in the 1950s generally accepted the notion that costs and benefits of essential
services are shared and collective, not individual.
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| Nancy Jane Moore, reading |
At which point, Julia asked the
panelists to define neoliberalism. Ian said that he defined it as evil
(eliciting gleeful responses from the audience). Audience members then offered
some help, culminating in Dan Dexter’s assertion that neoliberalism rests on
the total acceptance of capitalism’s ruling every sphere of life with
mitigation of its worst effects “where possible,” such that some people can
have clean water, decent health care, education, etc., while many, obviously
cannot. An audience member recommended Gangs
in America, which is about corporations. Another recommended the
documentary The Healing of America by
T.R. Reid. Another audience member, discussing Reid’s work, said that it
considered three forms of socialized healthcare currently in existence—the
single-payer model; the affordable healthcare model; and the
taking-profitability-out-of-healthcare model. I’ll skip over most of the rest
of the discussion, except for four comments particularly struck me: (1) from an
audience member: Bernie put a face on democratic socialism—we need to define
socialism as democratic socialism rather than totalitarian socialism; (2) Ian:
Most people don’t know people who are hungry unless they’re one of them; to win
the socialist argument, people need to understand statistics, since they have
no other way to see what the facts and problems actually are; and (3) from an
audience member: The left doesn’t do an abridged
version of leftist values and politics; we need to develop abridged versions, reframed
for popular consumption; and finally: someone noted that it should be pointed
out, when discussing the merits of capitalism vs socialism, that capitalism has
been proven to be a dismal, potentially catastrophic failure for serving human
needs in the twenty-first century.
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| Lesley Hall, reading |
Immediately after “Embracing
Socialism,” I attended 10,000 Feminisms, 10,000 Feminist SFs. This panel was
moderated by Julia Day, with Jackie Gross (aka LadyJax) and Lauren Lacey as
panelists. This panel was of particular interest me as a publisher of feminist
sf. From the beginning, I’ve been aware of the looseness of the term and the
broad spectrum of works that can be so classified—and that was at a time (2004)
when a lot of people believed feminist sf was over, years before we began to
see certain sectors of the mainstream claiming feminism for their own purposes.
Rather than discussing this aspect of the subject, though, the panelists
focused on recommending a rich array of different kinds of feminist sf works.
Julia began by asking the panelists to talk about both the best and the worst
titles of feminist sf they’d encountered. Lauren’s reply focused on a work she
particularly disliked, viz Sheri Tepper’s Beauty.
Feminist sf needs to ask, she said, what stories do we keep? Which do we
remake? What do we throw out? Beauty reinscribes
the power roles as traditionally told without attemption to reinvigorate the
fairy tale. Jackie Gross recalled Daughters
of the Coral Dawn as a poorly written work by an author, Katherine V.
Forrest, who wrote a work she loved: “Dreams and Swords.” I was delighted that
Jackie spoke often about the importance of the small press for feminist sf in
the 70s and 80s, mentioning Naiad Press, Daughters, Crossing Press’s
anthologies (to which I myself contributed a couple of stories), Firebrand
Books—and since I was seated in the audience, under no pressure at all to
remember, I mentally added several more to the list; and Jackie also spoke often,
throughout the panel, about the importance, pre-internet, of feminist
bookstores in making small-press feminist sf accessible (summoning up memories
of my visits to feminist bookstores in cities I was merely passing through, each
time snatching up books that would otherwise simply be known to me later by
reputation, so hard would they soon be to find).
The panelists also discussed feminist
narratives that are neither utopian nor dystopian, and Jackie observed that the
entry point for each reader is crucial. She suggested that the dystopias we
have now tend to use the dystopian form as a background to clichéd narratives
rather than as an examination of the structures and conditions themselves. She
also commented on the difference between reading The Handmaid’s Tale at the time it first appeared (1983) and now. In
a recent re-reading, she said, she asked what happened had to the people of
color who aren’t there. Jackie also talked about finding feminist sf in
unexpected places, for instances in a Steve Barnes work in which a guy on the
run encounters Motherland. When an audience member asked about new feminist sf,
the panel launched into a series of book (and publisher) recs. My last note on
the panel is a remark that Jackie spoke a great deal about the need to go
outside the mainstream press to find the feminist narratives we need. Everyone
who reads this blog will not be surprised to read that to that I uttered a
silent Amen.
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| Therese Pieczynski, reading |
My panel notes from then on became a
great deal sparser, until finally I stopped taking them at all. The panel
“Fandom and Fascism,” featuring Alexis Lothian, Julia Schroeder, and Megan
Condis (M) met in a room with too few chairs to accommodate everyone attending.
Megan began by noting that when Trump started to interact with (and retweet)
gamergaters, she was shocked into realizing that it is necessary to pay
attention to questions about what right-wingers are getting out of associating
with gamers, who have largely been non-respectable. She said she then came to
see that Trump et al are using gamergaters as a means of shedding their
old-fashioned images and dressing up racism, sexism etc as cool and hip. Alexis:
There’s no laying a claim that gamers are an “oppressed minority” (as some have
liked to see themselves)—the language of social justice is being appropriated
and adapted to their purposes. “Fascism has always had a fandom,” she noted,
and cited the example of Britain in the 1930s. And: The pleasures to be found
in fascism [in cosplay etc) are often enjoyed by people who identify themselves
as anti-fascist. Julia: The word “Nazi”
is no longer taken seriously in the media. (After which followed a discussion
of some of the many ways “nazi” gets slung around, diluting its power as a
designation.) Megan: The (HBO/HULU) Handmaid’s
Tale is both horrifying and banal. The villains look like ordinary
Americans. Julia: The humanization of the other [I think she meant of villains
in narratives] is taken to the extreme—we have to make the bad guys real
persons—but certain levels of evil shouldn’t be empathized with. Alexis: We
need to look at who it is who gets humanized by fandom. [Which concurs with my
thought, about how the usual stereotyped “others” so often figure as
one-dimensional “bad guys” in the mainstream, and how it’s only when the
villain is a straight white male do most narratives bother to humanize them.]
An audience member, Wendy Rose, asked: “Is it a trend that oppressors are given
understanding and sympathy rather than intolerance?” My notes on Alexis’s response
here are not quite legible, except for this “…as if oppressions are all
equivalent and work the same way.” Julia: The media take the attitude that
every opinion is valuable and acceptable. You can see this in the Harry Potter
and Star Wars fandoms: niceness at all costs. Ocala Wings from the audience: We
have a fandom of patriotism and a fandom of Trump—the media has been publishing
his every tweet. From the audience: What does it mean for fandom that its
narratives/characters are so protean that fans who are alt-right see one thing
while fans who are leftist see something entirely different? Alexis: She’s
struck by the desire to detach Nazis and other fascist iconography from Nazism
and fascism—generating meaning shifts—and the desire to separate iconography
from politics and its history. “Fandom,” she suggested, “has the capacity for
erotic engagement with fucked-up things.” My last note goes to an audience
member’s comment: The alt-right treats power structures as interchangeable.
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| Kiini Ibura Salaam, reading, with Andrea Hairston |
Those were the panels I attended on
Friday. I attended several more on Saturday and Sunday, but took few notes. The
“Sort of” panel, moderated by Susan Ramirez with Lee Blauerstein, W.L. Bolm,
Nicole Fadellin, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and Nisi Shawl offered much to think
about; Kiini’s “Identity is a created box with boundaries that people kill to
preserve” and Nisi’s “Becoming/being “sort of” comes from the outside” demanded
to be quoted in my notes. “Borders, Boundaries, and Liminal Spaces” with Julia
Starkey moderating, featuring Julia Rios, Isabel Schecter, and Anna-Marie
McLemore [subbing for Amal El-Mohtar], and the Speculative Fiction in
Translation panel with Rachel Cordasco, Sue Burke, and our own Arrate, at which
Rachel provided an amazing list of work in translation published in the last
year—and which sent me to Small Beer Press’s table to purchase a new Angelica
Gorodischer title in translation. During the “Border, Boundaries, and Liminal
Spaces” panel, Julia Starkey clued us in on Amal’s experience traveling from
Toronto to the US to be a GoH at this very WisCon—of being detained on Canadian
soil by the US Border Patrol, a degrading experience, that she said Amal had
noted would have been a great deal worse had her skin been as dark, say, as her
brother’s. Oh, I almost forgot! On Saturday evening, I attended a jam-packed panel
that attracted too many attendees to fit into the room—titled “The Myth of the
Career,” discussing the doom of the gig economy, featuring Richard Dutcher,
B.C. Holmes, Victor Raymond, Jessie Sarber, and moderator Rachel Kronick. This
panel evoked heavy, intense audience participation and could easily have gone
on for hours. It could have been subtitled “Neoliberalism bites.”
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| An Aqueduct reading |
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| Eleanor Arnason, reading |
And finally, the readings: Aqueduct’s
two official readings, as another offered by more Aqueductistas. On Saturday
afternoon
Kiini Ibura Salaam, Andrea
Hairston, Pan Morigan, and Sheree Renee Thomas gave beautiful, powerful
readings.
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| Andrea Hairston, reading |
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| Andrea Hairston, Pan Morigan, & Sheree Renee Thomas |
And on Sunday, two Aqueduct readings took place back-to-back, with Cynthia
Ward, Beth Plutchak, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and myself featured in the first session
and Eleanor Arnason, Lesley Hall, Nancy Jane Moore, and Therese Pieczynski in
the second. A good time, I promise you, was had by all.
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| Beth Plutchak |
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| Cynthia Ward, reading |
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| L. Timmel Duchamp, talking |
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